Musings, rants, and anecdotes from the Emerald City

At our increasingly semi regular meeting, I floated the idea of taking over my beautiful friend Grant’s tinder profile for a month if he let me buy his beer. He refused, which is obviously bullshit, but it got me to thinking; why? Why wouldn’t he want one of his best friends who only wants his never ending happiness to manage his love life? No one knows what’s better for him than Sean(who would obviously help) and myself, so why would he refuse?

It’s pretty obvious, let me count the ways:

Grant is afraid of being happy

He doesn’t want to find forever love in this lifetime

He’s rightly suspicious he’ll die of a sex overdose

My commitments conservatively, on what he’ll get out of this:

3 first dates in this month

2 second dates

The greatest trust fall experience he’ll ever have

So what does the world get out of this?

I’ll blog every interaction of this experiment. The world will watch Grant meet the dozens of women of his dreams by way of the clever wit and prose provided by his partners in blogging and he will of course have a beautiful life experience that he can write about, of course from the bed of his new soulmate that he’ll meet probably just hours after letting us use his account.

Now I don’t think he’ll be super interested in this, so i started this petition on change.org. Let’s just assume he can’t say no if we get 100 signatures. Hell, I think 10 would be more than enough.

It’s been interesting. I didn’t really care to own them. I wanted the eggs, and my wife committed to all of the cleaning and care. I just had to build all the stuff and I love that shit so we got chickens.

We got 6 chickens. It’s because they say you should expect to lose 20% and 1 in 9 might be sexed wrong and we wanted 4 or 5, so we got 6. The weird urban farm store owner(the store is weird, not the owner; he’s really nice) confirmed this. So we brought 6 tiny chirping things home. We have committed to not naming them until they are survived, and it’s not like i could tell them apart at all anyways.

There was one though. She was smaller. She was weaker. She couldn’t jump on the little wooden obstacle i made for them to learn to roost. We always knew her. She was tiny and she even looked weird. Something was even wrong with that little thing on her head(it’s called a comb). I didn’t really have any attachment to the birds. They just occupied space in my garage and basement which was a little frustrating to me and they smelled and they kick up like a shit ton of dust all the time. I liked Runty though.

1 week in and there’s a crisis. At 4 in the morning the birds are all making a ton of noise. It’s weird how their calls change according to their mood. It’s like they’re yelling and panicking. I go in to the laundry room and the red heat lamp is out. When you get baby chicks you’re supposed to keep them at 90+ degrees for a few weeks and they were suddenly sitting at about 65 in my basement. They were all bouncing around freaking out. All except for one who’s laying there, collapsed forward and looking like shit. My wife and I don’t know what to do, but I’m certain there’s nothing I can’t fix so i pick her up and start cupping her in my hands and blowing as much heat on her as I could. My wife gets a tiny syringe and starts force feeding her water and she starts to perk up. She opens her eyes and she’s chirping every once in awhile. I find another flood light bulb and screw it in to get the heat up and I go to home depot when it opens at 6am and buy the special bulb and then I build a weird little stand and everything’s back to normal before I go to work at 715. Runty was weird for the rest of the day but she was back.

Well weeks go by and the chickens are getting bigger but Runty is still different.. she stands really weird. Instead of chirping she has a weird kind of honk, like a stupid goose. I finish building the coop and we’re getting ready to move the birds outside and I can’t wait to get them out of my fucking house and my wife is taking them out once in awhile to acclimate them so they’re walking around the yard. When Runty is out, we immediately notice something. She walks really weird. One leg crosses the other and goes backwards. She is not graceful or nimble in the least. She looks awful.

My wife has been reading about chicken ownership for the last decade so she is ready for the brutal situations and she starts to talk about how we’re going to have to put her down and I’m really upset about this. Why can’t we just let her live out her existence? My wife says she’s probably in a lot of pain. I insist that she calls the shop and this and that. Of course we’re not going to take her to the vet because she cost $2.99 but I’m looking for anything we can do.

I make Sarah return her to her brood box so she can’t move as much and she can maybe rest it for a couple of days. Doesn’t help. I google all kinds of shit and find that some people have fixed an ailment called splayed leg that looks really familiar. There’s nothing I can’t fix so I follow the instructions and make a weird kind of chicken splint. It’s like a tiny pair of bird handcuffs. She can’t handle it and it’s not helping.

We return her to the coop and run because if she’s going to go, I want her to have a healthy few days with her friends. It’s sunny and she’s out and she can feed herself and get water just fine. I’m starting to think we just leave her. Everything we read said that if the injury is serious the bird won’t be able to feed herself and they pass that way and that’s not going to happen. Again, my wife the chicken student tells me that the others will pick on her and kill her if they recognize her as injured. Well that’s not happening so I am thinking we’re good.

As soon as I can think that sentence, we start to see it. Every time we look and another chicken is going after her. We talked to a friend and he confirmed that we should kill her and that we shouldn’t let the chickens do it because it’s nasty and it will be way worse and take a long time and be painful. He also gave us some tips for how to do it.

Sarah and I let this go for a few days because we’re really busy and i’m really upset about this bird. And i wasn’t going to take care of these chickens!? and now i have to kill one!? and who is going to do what?! ….and I couldn’t fix it…

I went for drinks with my brilliant startup programmer friend the other week. It’s something I do from time to time and it makes me feel full of life (nothing like my dreary writers group!) and we talk about great things and we drink too much. Despite making his life as a programmer, his background is in physics and while discussing the current state of our union, he mentioned that it’s just the universe increasing in entropy.

Now I also loved physics as a high school and college student and while I didn’t major in it, I certainly got my fill as an engineer and I too know that the saying is ‘the entropy of a system always increases.’ I was mistaken however when I repeated my understanding of it(as I think many understand it) as the disorder in a system increasing (which also made sense given our current political atmosphere).

He corrected me by describing entropy as the release of energy, or restated it as a system will always find a lower energy state.

Now we were pretty drunk at this point but I tried to hold fast to my ‘but isn’t that still chaos?’ idea.

No. You might experience chaos personally as it sputters and dies, but it, or its individual parts, are releasing energy and are then finding a lower energy state by not working anymore.

Ok, ok, so how is our current political system not going towards chaos?

It’s just a lower energy state. People don’t have to understand anything anymore, so they don’t. Less trying, less effort, less energy. They just latch onto a narrative. People stop voting, or they vote with the least amount of information possible, despite more being available. It would take more energy for everyone to engage and to get good people in place to fix the things. The low energy path is putting in more of the same, or encouraging the same system down its current path, until it inevitably breaks, you put an ego maniac in place whose proud of not reading and your pistons finally seizing and the car stops.

And then chaos! Right?

Well maybe, what is the next path to the next lower energy state? Is it riot and revolution and rebuilding, or is it a shuffling of the cards where only good people get through the door because that’s an easier system? I don’t know. I wish I could project but things only really happen if the system makes it easy and we’ve built a system for corruption. What does it look like when that system chokes itself out?

Enter the lake wobegon or dunning kruger effect: Dumb people tend to think everyone else is dumb and we’ve made it ok to be dumb, or at least validated the dumb persons idea that dumb is just as good as smart (a lower energy state, surely) when it comes to discourse. How is this increasingly relevant idea going to play out? Intellectual civil war? Books vs guns?

I wish I was Robert Reich here and could logically identify the historical trends that are about to reemerge but I can’t. I can say thought that you should go have beers with your friends. You’ll talk about some crazy things for awhile and you’ll feel better about the world because there’s someone out there who likes talking about the same things as you and you can reinforce all of your cognitive biases because that’s the easiest path.

Want to meet some new people? Want to find an outlet for yourself in 2015? Well good.

We need more writers! We could also use an editor!

Why the need? We are some working class dudes and although we love this website and getting together to work on it, we few, we four, can really fall behind or really lose track of time.

Why do we do this? Because in a world driven by commerce and logic and science, we all need some creation and some art in our lives. We all have a thing for writers and writing and we come together to ‘get it out’. Continue reading →

This is actually also sort of a concert review – Does anyone else know about concert reviews? Either they’re not a thing anymore, or they’re not a thing in Seattle, or maybe I’m imagining it and it never was a thing. I have these memories of picking up the local indie paper in St. Louis and seeing blips and blurbs about the shows from the previous weekend. Did I just make that up? I’ve looked for some kind of reviews on the last couple shows I went to and there’s literally nothing. Nothing!

I love music. Unfortunately it’s not as much a part of my life as I would like. If you’ve shared enough drinks with me you’ll learn that I was a DJ and station manager at my college radio station, a magical place where I learned so much about punk, blues, underground hip hop, booze, drugs, and women. For three years I was immersed in music, talking about it and finding new things to listen to, criticize, and fall in love with every single day.

And then I graduated and got a day job somewhere in the midwest. And then I stopped being able to easily find good music…